I wanted to play with a VXLAN mesh between VMs on more than one hypervisor node, but the setup for VXLAN ended up being a separate post because it was a bit long. Read that post first if you want to follow the instructions here. Now that we have a working VXLAN mesh between our…
Setting up VXLAN on Google Compute Engine
So my ultimate goal here is to try out VXLAN between some VMs on instances in Google compute engine, but today I’m just going to get VXLAN working because that took a fair bit longer than I expected. First off, boot your instances — because I will need nested virt later I chose two instances…
Playing with the python prometheus query API
The last few days have been a bit icky around here, with my house apparently proudly residing in the major city with the dirtiest air in the world. So, I needed a distraction… It has also been quite hot, so I wondered how my energy usage was going. I have prometheus monitoring of my power…
Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: online training
There are a few online training resources I’ve had a play with while learning Kubernetes, so I figure that’s worth a quick write up. This is a follow on from my post about Kubernetes podcasts I’ve tried. I’ve tried three training providers so far: The Linux Foundation Kubernetes course (LFS258 Kubernetes Fundamentals) is probably the…
Hacking on Arlec Christmas lights with tasmota
I’m loving the wide array of electrically certified home automation devices we’re seeing now. Light bulbs, sensors, power boards, and even Christmas lights. Specifically Arlec is shipping these app controllable Christmas lights this year, which looked very much like they should work with Tasmota. (Sorry for the terrible product picture, I can’t find this product…
Further thoughts on Azure instance start times
My post from the other day about slow instance starts on Azure caused some commentary (mainly on reddit) that prompted me to think more about all this. In the end, there were a few more experiments I wanted to run to see if I could squeeze more performance out of Azure. First off, looking at…
Why is Azure so slow to start instances?
I’ve been playing with terraform recently, and decided to see how different the terraform for launching a simple Ubuntu instance in various clouds is. There are two big questions there for me — how big is the variation between OpenStack derived clouds; and how painful is it to move between the proprietary clouds? Part of…
Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: podcasts
It has become clear to me that it is time to care about Kubernetes more. I’m sure many people have cared for ages, but the things I want to build at the moment are starting to be more container based now that I am thinking more at the application layer than the cloud infrastructure layer….
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
This book discusses science and technical communication from the perspective of someone who comes from professional theatre and acting. Alan explains how his accidental discovery of the application of theatre sports to communication created an opportunity to teach technical communicators how to be more effective. Essentially, the argument is that empathy is essential to communication…
Prometheus 2.12, query logging, and startup failures on macos
Prometheus v2.12 added active query logging. The basic idea is that there is a mmaped JSON file that contains all of the queries currently running. If prometheus was to crash, that file would therefore be a list of the queries running at the time of the crash. Overall, not a bad idea. Some friends had…